Straight from the gut : Analysis

An excellent book. I had posted earlier about how GE the company was taking the drastic changes "inflicted" by JW.
I sometimes feel he was lucky; Six Sigma, e-Business, Globalization all worked for him. GE set the standards. I was inspired enough to start dreaming about working for GE; well, let us see, if I feel it is good enough :-).
Passion is the key word here, plenty of it in his book. The book screams at you to take control of your life. Be a balanced extrovert at all times, seize every opportunity, climb every wall and never hesitate to Fire.
As he fittingly says "If you don't take control of your life's destiny, someone else will" (or some similar quote, I don’t remember the exact words)
Maybe his policies of fire the bottom 10% is not practiced heavily all around, but it worked wonders at GE, and look at them now. They have their hands into everything, and its not peripheral, it goes deep.
GE Capital is the paragon of JW's and GE's core ideology. It's still a little small in India but let us see.
GE was one of the first companies to practice - "Move Businesses to places where they are executed the best". Example: Software is outsourced to India, because of India's growing expertise and cheap labor. Globalization is continuously happening all around us.

"Fire the bottom 10%" - This is never gonna happen in my company for sure. Worst case, they get a CRR 4. Masti karo, enjoy and then move on; not in GE my dear.

"If you don't take control of your life's destiny, someone else will" - Very apt in India's scenario. Clever management can get any person a foothold of the situation and exploit it to one's benefit. I'm not saying its wrong, nothing is (except when it happens to you).
I've seen plenty of examples in My IT Company. I feel like helping them sometimes, not at my own expense. A little selfish maybe, but in Infy, I think it is a must sometimes.

"Boundaryless" - Pretty well practiced in Infy too. I'm going to carry this with me forever. No hierarchy, everyone is equal when at the table. And never expect the table to perform and stop blaming it. It's the people around it, who need to come to a consensus.

"What has the Company done for me?" - This is pretty often asked by millions of the working class. Hell, even I used to crib about with the same statement. Not after I've read this book. "What have I done for the Company?" comes first. It will treat you with the same respect, which you treat it with. This is why I am taking Infy's blows at me currently, silently, but remembering every moment of it.

"E-Business" - E-Business is big now. I read about ING-Vysya today, on how there using blogs to promote their insurance work. This is a first, I thought: but there have plenty of the same. Everything is online these days; the debate "Is the Computer a necessary evil?" is dead.

"Globalization”: I'm including this because of the book that I’m reading currently - "The World is Flat". Imagine a world without boundaries, no barriers to information or data. Actually, one needn't imagine anymore, the globalized world is already here. I'm not going to talk about the flip side of globalization here; lets keep it positive today. Cheers to limitless FDI flowing into India.

So much more to say, will write as it flows through my keyborad.....

Working Late

My team has been up for almost the entire week.
Long coffee breaks and dosas over the night till 2 AM.
Cribbing abt our client waiting for the long process of checking in the source..
Our team has sure got closer....

The Education System in India

Our education system is a gigantic conglomeration which educates millions of students daily. Various aspirations of different students are met through our expansive examination oriented routine. This essay is going to discuss the different opinions that are running through my head, fighting over one another to gain precedence.

The way education is practiced in India has many critics. There are also an equal number of proponents to the same. It depends on which facet of education you look at. Currently with India's mass I don't think there could be any other viable solution other than making the system examination oriented. Good Institutions would definitely like the best students and the only fair way they are going to get them in our country are through exams.

Take government Institutions for example; currently they are tackling this issue with the help of reservation. Many backward class people have gotten into good places of study with the help of reservation. I am not a proponent of reservation, since I have on occasions been on the receiving end, but I also have no right to be a critic, since reservation has indeed in a certain ways helped many people.

Now moving on to Private Institutions. These are heavily examination oriented (atleast the majority of them) and supposedly filter out the lower aptitude students through their exams (lower aptitude on that particular day of course :) ). Unless forced by the government these Institutions do not practice reservation. They are mainly money making ventures and the only way they are going to get the best students are through the various exams and aptitude tests.

If our education system is not the solution, then whom do we follow?
Let us ideally take the US for example here. Their neighborhood schooling system is the pride of their nation. Their Universities are world class and are the best in the world. India ideally could adopt such a system, but is it viable?? For a mass so great I do not think this is an easy task. It requires a lot of ground work and implementation of the same. The greatest factor here is time. We are going to need a lot of it, along with patience and perseverance.

Considering our huge pool of students, we must come up with a unique system which combines the examination oriented approach along with the neighborhood schooling and University approach.; thus preventing brain drain.

I have only addressed a small aspect of our education system, looking at it from a highly the Macro level. Going deeper there are so many issues that need resolution, through effective debate continued with action.

My opinion on Manju

What happened was definitely sad; this is the second time that an incident like this has got widespread media response.
It is absolutely true that the incidents of murders of Manjunath (Indian oil) and Satyendra Dubey (Golden Quad) have created so much noise because they are from the IIT's and the IIM's. Incidents like this do not occur often, when educated people are brutally murdered for believing in what they thought was right.


Opinion 1:
This is similar to BW's case study. We must definitely make a big deal out of this situation and bring awareness among people by bringing to light the atrocities that go on; either in secret or out in the open as in this case.
We should not just be sorry about the situation and the state of affairs in India, and give the naive "Time will heal us" bullshit. It is high time that we woke up to reality and act, instead of think.
As BW says, Indians are great thinkers, but a very few of them have the courage or the determination to act. "They have thought of the idea right?, it's for the Government to implement it now". Like that is going to happen!!
This endless cycle of shifting blame onto the Government should stop. We need to facilitate the country in helping find criminals of the system.
The problem of course occurs when the system itself has an ugly side to it. Though I do not have a concrete solution for this now, I'm hoping it will surface soon.

Opinion 2:
Is this the first time that injustice like this has been meted out. Definitely not, this has been going on for a long time. This time it's an IIM grad, next time it could just be a poor villager. The poor villager incident will never get the recognition even remotely similar to this, even with the media knowing about the same. Why? Because that doesn't sell, murder of an IIM grad, oh hell yea, there is so much noise, people in anguish everywhere on how such incidents occur to the "upper class".
What needs to be changed is our mindset, we are all the same, let it be an IIT/IIM or a remote college form any village.

Reading...

I've found a new love in my life, and surprise of surprises it's reading.. I've never been the avid reader, swallowing book after book, in a never ending quest for knowledge or let's say entertainment. I more been the TV guy; if my communication is any good, it's because of the myriad of movies that I have watched during my high school and college.
I used to be a solid movie buff, with latest updates on any English movie, let it be action, sci-fi, comedy or romance.
A break from this routine started when I joined infy. I tried to carry and continue my movie routine into the company. Used to stay late in my cubicle and watch movies incessantly. But it was slowly fading. By the end of 2004, it was completely phased out. I had no new updates on any of the latest movies, let alone watch them.
After an unsuccessful swing at both CAT and GRE, I got back to my "workaholic" ways.

Jun 2005 :
Life moved on, with me waiting impatiently for the future to unfold. I new this year was going to make or break it all. And I was determined for it to be the former.
I had a set of interesting friends during my affair with CAT 2005. These guys helped me realize that life is more than just an exam, it's about taking your chances well; and not to get too disappointed when you miss with a big or a small swing.

We used to spend time at Anupam's place, whether we used to study or not, our endless MBA jargon used to keep flowing to make us feel better and to instill some confidence into the hearts for a few of us. (who would have of course flopped the aimcat during the past week)

I've totally veered away from my topic, wanted to make my previous para a separate post, but just couldn't stop.

As for books, I came across a wide variety of books at Anupam's place. I always had an inner voice telling me to go ahead and give priority to reading, but I never took a single step towards it.
Newspapers and magazines were ok, I used to read them a lot; but books which take you into the author's world, seldom.

I borrowed two books from Anupam's that day; "The future of Capitalism" and "Catch 22". I started with Catch 22, grappled through a few pages and ditched it.
Too "whatever" for a start after a long hiatus.
My other friend Satheesh suggested "The Alchemist", a short 200 page book with a good easy to read print. He warned me though about it being a little heavy.
"Perfect!", I told myself.
By this time, I was literally going mad, because my inner voice was screaming, urging me to start with a book asap.

When my friend suggested the Alchemist, I had decided that I would get it from Odyssey in the evening.
By evening, the Chennai showers has started. It was raining elephants and hippopotamuses.
I wasn't goona be shaken by a few drops; I battered along and reached Odyssey on foot. Got the book and headed home.

After dinner, I stared on the book, it was interesting in a way, totally abstract, yet making sense somewhere inside me. I finished the book in about 3-4 days; not bad for starter I thought. I felt refreshed, doing something else other than studying for CAT or sitting in my cubicle, getting wasted away.

Coincidently my Dad got "The Monk who sold his Ferrari" on the same day. My dad had not bought a book for a long time, as far as I can remember. He always used his office library.

This was a sure sign, I was on my way, into this new world. It seemed exciting and surreal.

More books followed; I'm currently reading Jack Welch's Straight from the gut, and boy I have a lot to say about this book. It will be in a separate post I guess.

As for this one, I'm finishing off this one by hoping that this new love would continue forever as my other love, in my life.

Do you sudoku?

The business of brain teasers

May 21st 2005
From The Economist print edition

A puzzling global phenomenon

TO ITS fans, it is addictive. To the media, it is a promising money-maker. Sudoku, an old puzzle long popular in Japan is fast gaining popularity the world over. In Britain, a sudoku book is a bestseller and national newspapers are competing feverishly to publish the most, and the most fiendish, puzzles. (Last week the Guardian printed a board on every page of one day's features section.) Meanwhile, the puzzle is being published in newspapers from Australia to Croatia to America. The Japanese buy more than 600,000 sudoku magazines a month. Even the New York Times is considering introducing sudoku in its Sunday magazine, alongside its venerated crossword.

The game's appeal is that its rules are as simple as its solution is complex. On a board of nine-by-nine squares, most of them empty, players must fill in each square with a number so that each row (left to right), column (top to bottom) and block (in bold lines) contains 1 to 9. (A sample accompanies this article; the solution appears here.) Advanced versions use bigger boards or add letters from the alphabet.

Sudoku—the Japanese word combines “number” and “single”—seems perfectly suited to modern times, a puzzle for an era when people are more numerate than literate. And like globalism itself, sudoku transcends borders by requiring no translation.

The overall business of puzzles is hard to measure, but revenues in America from magazines, syndicated newspaper sales, books, and online and phone services are almost $200m annually. The New York Times earns millions of dollars a year from its crosswords and hundreds of thousands from a special phone service that provides hints. Over 30,000 people pay $35 a year for the newspaper's e-mail version, says Will Shortz, the crossword-puzzle editor.

For now, sudoku revenues are more modest. The person who supplies most western papers with the puzzle—Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge—does so for nothing, to promote sales of the sudoku software he developed, initially for fun. He says that if trends continue he may earn $1m this year from software sales and book royalties. Michael Harvey, features editor of the Times of London, which first published the puzzle in November, thereby setting off Britain's sudoku craze, claims that the grids have brought many new readers to the paper.

Puzzles have long been popular. A word square dates from 1st-century Pompeii. The crossword puzzle was launched in the New York World in 1913. After a compilation appeared in 1924—the first book by Simon & Schuster—the genre exploded. It is now a daily staple for millions of people worldwide.

Will sudoku, whose origins lie in an 18th-century Swiss mathematician's game called “Latin squares”, follow suit? Might it even prove to be the disruptive technology that kills the crossword? In the battle between left-brain and right-brain people for puzzle primacy, crossword aficionados defend their squares, noting that word puzzles offer more variety of themes, sizes and skill levels. “It is not obvious how you can vary the [sudoku] puzzle to make it more interesting”, says Mr Shortz. “It is what it is”.

How to Make a Fork and Spoon Appear to Defy Gravity

This is a basic trick that enables you to defy the laws of physics--or at least fool others into thinking so. You can take common dinner utensils and make them appear to hover in space on the edge of a glass.

Steps

1. Gather a glass has at least some mass to it, especially if it has a wide mouth with a tapered bottom. Fill it at least half full of liquid since the entire weight of the silverware will be supported on one single point on the outside edge of the glass.
2. 

   
   

   Overlapping first and last tines
   Take the fork and spoon and "hook" them together using the first and last tines of the fork overlapping the spoon. The handle ends both need to be pointed in the same direction, making a very crude boomerang shape with the two together.
3. Place the toothpick in between the tines at the center of the apparatus (basically, stick the toothpick in the centermost position while it is still touching the spoon). Leave as much toothpick sticking towards the center of the "boomerang" shape as possible.
4. Take the whole kit and (here comes the tricky part) balance the toothpick (the toothpick will be horizontal, mind you) on the edge of the glass with the two handle ends pointing back towards the glass.
5. 

   
   
   Make it balance by moving the toothpick from side to side as well as closer to and farther away from the glass.
6. Consider burning the ends of the toothpick off after you have balanced everything. Then sit back and collect your bets.

Tips

• The toughest part of the trick is getting the balancing done. Some forks and spoons do not want to cooperate, so try it at home with your own silverware or do it at a restaurant you visit often to see if theirs will work as well.
• You can set fire to both ends of the toothpick after you've balanced them and they will burn up right to the point where they're touching the glass and the silverware to really drive home the fact that it looks really really cool just hanging there in mid-air.
• A square body toothpick is superior to a round one for this trick, as the round one has a tendency to roll a lot when you're trying to balance the apparatus.

Things You'll Need

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• 1 Spoon
• 1 Fork
• 1 Toothpick
• 1 Drinking glass (or sturdy cup)